The Mars Expedition

Did people around you have any concerns that this lyric was going to dovetail with—

He interrupts. He knows where this is going. On September 19, 2010, just as his first solo single, "Just the Way You Are," was rising toward number one, Mars was arrested in a bathroom at the Hard Rock casino in Las Vegas and subsequently charged with cocaine possession. (The arresting officer claimed that Mars said, "Can I speak to you honestly, sir?" and told him that he had done something foolish but had never used drugs before. Mars took education courses and performed community service in exchange for the case's
dismissal.)

"Yeah," he says. "Really, it's on me. It's like: 'Bruno, you want to deal with this shit? You know when Chris comes over, he's going to ask you about that shit, right?' " But he refuses to censor a song for a reason like that. "If I changed for the masses so that I don't have to answer this question, then I'm a puppet! Then this isn't fun for me anymore."

Good answer. But now, of course, Chris is going to ask you about that shit.

"Let's hear it. It's not my first rodeo."

So, Vegas. What happened that night?

"I was young, man! I was in fucking Vegas. I wasn't thinking."

What did you think when they caught you?

"That was the thing—I wasn't thinking."

But it was a real "oh shit" moment?

"Oh yeah, just like any other human, anyone that's ever been arrested before: 'Yeah, dummy.' "

Were you scared?

"Oh yeah, of course. I was given a number one record and I'm out doing dumb shit."

And you told them it was the first time you'd ever done anything like that?

"I don't know where that came from. I was really intoxicated. I was really drunk. So a lot of that is a big blur, and I try every day to forget and keep pushing."

But if you did tell them that, might it have been shading the truth a little?

He pauses for some time. "I don't know if I should comment on that or not."

What were the lessons from it?

" 'I can take this shit away from you, young man.' That was the lesson. You've slaved away for years and years and years. You've prepped your whole life. It's all you know how to do. You're a kid experiencing life in fucking Sin City, and that was the lesson: It can all be taken away. Put you in a weird place. Embarrass you."

···

Mars picks me up from my hotel at around one in the morning. As I slide into the backseat next to him, he hands me an unlabeled bottle of rum to swig from. Tomorrow lunchtime he must board a twelve-hour flight to Japan, his first visit there since his stage debut twenty-three years earlier, and he sees little point in sleeping too much beforehand. So tonight is for poker. "There's few things that take my mind off of music, and I've found just sitting down and looking at cards does that," he says.

Commerce Casino, our destination, is, he says, "the biggest card room in the world." It is also where he would play most often before he became known as Bruno Mars. Usually he would come with his friend Mo, an insurance broker. This was just before the sport became so popular. "I used to pay my rent doing that shit," he says.

What's your style?

"I used to be like a loudmouth. You know the guy, people would want to take his money. If you do get them to lose, they're out for you, they're gunning for you. And that's when they're weak. And that's when you jump or pounce on them."

What's the most common mistake people make?

"Buying into my bullshit."

Mars remembers his first casino visit. He was 19, underage, and went to a casino two hours away in the mountains with Jeff Bhasker, now also a well-known pop producer but then in a cover band with Mars. (They were called Sex Panther.) "I remember my first bet, my hand was shaking," he says, "and a guy called me out on it and embarrassed me." Mars lost a hundred bucks, a hundred dollars he couldn't afford and had no business gambling with. "You gotta lose," he says. "You just have to lose to win, to understand."

We pull into the casino driveway, past some plaster giraffes, and park outside a hallway which leads past a chariot and four horses to the tables.

"Here we are!" he says. "Look at this! Class dot-com!"

Inside, the floor guys who work here greet him warmly, a face from the old days. When he speaks with anyone, he introduces me as his uncle from Switzerland. Each time he sees me jot down a note, he'll whisper to me, "You're going to get me killed in here."

He'll later tell me that he brought $3,400 here with him tonight. "A grown man should always carry cash, right?" he says. "I don't know who told me, but someone told me that a long time ago, and the biggest turnoff is when a guy doesn't have cash on him." At his allotted table, he slips this cash to be exchanged for chips so discreetly that I don't even see him do it. (It's a $600 minimum to buy in on a table like this, but as he told me in the car, "most guys buy in for four grand, so if you buy in for the $600 you're basically just Nemo.") I notice that the dealer calls him Peter, though Mars doesn't realize this and will seem surprised afterward when I point it out. "I didn't hear that. Really? Wow. That's like in school. Or when I'm in trouble."

Play on this table seems careful. "There's no gamblers here," he complains quietly to me after a while. "It's tight. Not my style at all. Nobody's drunk." Sometime in the second hour he loses a big hand for several thousand dollars that he felt sure he would win, but he accepts the loss with equanimity. As the clock passes three o'clock, then four o'clock, he makes new deadlines with himself to get up from the table—three forty-five, four fifteen—but each of them passes by. Though I like it here, he keeps apologizing. "The sicko wouldn't leave the table...." he says. I don't think he is so much trying to make his money back—though bit by bit, with some quiet, aggressive play, he does so. It's more that he is waiting for that one great satisfying hand.